Foreign Office denies minister’s claim the Chagos Islands deal has been paused – UK politics live | Politics

The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker for giving Peter Mandelson’s lawyers information pointing to him as the source of a claim that the former UK ambassador planned to flee the country, Pippa Crerar reports.

Labour is attacking Reform UK in Gorton and Denton today on the basis that Nigel Farage sold “false promises” to voters during the Brexit referendum.

In a stunt which it has also filmed for social media, it has driven a red bus in the constituency with a slogan on its side saying: “Remember the £350m a week for our NHS? You can’t trust our Farage.”

In one sense this is unfair; in 2016 it was Vote Leave that claimed (falsely) that the UK was giving £350m a week to the EU that could be spent on the NHS instead, and it had this slogan on the side of its campaign bus. Farage was not involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and after the referendum he claimed he had never approved of the £350m a week claim and regarded it as a “mistake”.

But Farage did as much as anyone to ensure that Britain did vote to leave the EU in 2016, and there were other claims that he did make about Brexit where the alleged benefits have failed to materialise. It is notable that now Farage does not speak much about that process at all, and he changed the name of his party from the Brexit party to Reform UK.

The Labour advert is also notable because, until recently, Labour has been reluctant to say anything critical of the Vote Leave campaign because it has been worried about offending pro-Brexit Labour supports.

When Morgan McSweeney was Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, he was one of the Labour figures more nervous about sounding anti-Brexit. Now that he has left, the party seems more confident about making the “false promises” argument.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

Controversial plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.

Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, was speaking on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.

In a bombshell intervention last month, the US president said that Keir Starmer was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for continued use by the UK and US of their airbase on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.

Speaking in response to an urgent question put foward in the Commons by the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage (see 2.31pm), Falconer said:

We have a process going through parliament in relation to the treaty.

We will bring that back to parliament at the appropriate time. We are pausing for discussions with our American counterparts.

The government scrambled to contain the confusion created by Falconer’s comments, which were immediately reported by the BBC, with sources in the Foreign Office saying that he had “misspoke.”

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “There is no pause. We have never set a deadline. Timings will be announced in the usual way.”

However, the intervention was immediately pounced on by Conservative shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, who is currently in the US meeting political figures there about the deal, which she described as “an appalling act of betrayal.”

She said:

I am in Washington lobbying senior administration figures on this issue and I am pleased the UK Government has been forced to pause the legislation.

But ministers must go further: now it is time for Keir Starmer to face reality and kill this shameful surrender once and for all before it does any more damage.

Speaking earlier, Falconer had made it clear that the UK government was taking notice of the intervention on social media by Trump, who went against the grain not just of what he had previously said but also against US government’ policy.

Trump accepted the deal last year, criticised it in January, subsequently described it as the “best” deal Starmer could make in the circumstances, and then described it as a “terrible deal” and a “big mistake” last week.

Falconer told MPs: “The view of the United States president may well have changed but the treaty has not.”

Farage used the UQ on Wednesday to force the issue onto the agenda on Wednesday after he had accused of “performing Maga stunts” with a claim that the British government stopped him from travelling to the Chagos Islands on a humanitarian mission.

The Reform UK leader said he had flown to the Maldives to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius.

In a video posted on X on Saturday, Farage claimed the UK government had blocked his trip to the territory, which cannot be entered without a valid permit.

Wearing a striped polo shirt and sunglasses around his neck, Farage said:

The British government are applying pressure on the president and the government of the Maldives to do everything within their power to stop me getting on that boat and going to the Chagos Islands.

Serious doubts have been raised about the dual role of Scotland’s top law officer after it emerged that the first minister was informed of criminal charges against Peter Murrell nearly a year before they were made public. Libby Brooks and Severin Carrell have the story.

Nigel Farage has claimed that the Maldives are set to issue a counter-claim to the international court of justice over the Chagos Islands in “just a few days”, the Press Association reports. PA says:

The Reform UK leader visited the Maldives, an independent archipelagic nation in the Indian Ocean, over the weekend and posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, claiming the UK had stopped him going to the Chagos Islands.

He claimed during an urgent question in the Commons that the Maldives are “upset” about the UK government’s plans to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

The deal, which the government argues secures operation of a joint UK-US base on the island of Diego Garcia for at least 99 years, will also allow Chagossians to return to the outer islands.

Farage said: “I can tell you this from my trip to the Maldives at the weekend – something I hadn’t realised, and I don’t know whether the government knows it either.

“It is the Maldives that has the historical links with the Chagos Islands, both in terms of trade, in terms of archaeology. In fact, the islands, all the French did was rename the islands from Maldivian language.

“There is no basis, historically, culturally, in any way, for Mauritius to have a claim on those islands.

“And the Maldives are upset for two reasons. One, there has been great stability in this region for decades, and what happens with this treaty, if it goes through, is you finish up with a turf war going on between India and China in the region, and that indeed has already started.

“And I wish to inform the government that we are just a few days away, in my opinion, from the Maldives issuing a counter-claim to the international court of justice to say, if anybody has the right to the sovereignty of those islands, it is the Maldives and not Mauritius.

“And I would urge you to pause all of this.”

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing, the PM’s spokersperson declined to say when the government might be announcing changes to the student loan system. (See 12.07pm.) “I won’t get ahead of the spring statement,” he said, when asked if there might be an announcement in the statement, which is next week.

He said work on this was continuing, but declined to give any more details or a timeframe, saying “we’ll update when we have one”.

According to ITV’s Robert Peston, Peter Mandelson is adamant that he and his lawyers were told by the police that the lord speaker was the person who tipped them off about Mandelson being a flight risk, not the Commons speaker – who has admitted being the source (see 11.49am). Peston thinks there was simple misunderstanding. He says:

A source close to Mandelson says “police were emphatic it was the Lords’ speaker” and his “lawyers checked specifically”.

Presumably the arresting officers were told the tip-off came from “the speaker” and assumed it must be the Lords because Mandelson was a lord.

One of the rules of PMQs is that there is a correlation between the quality of the exchanges here (never high at the best of times) and at the imminence of an election. With the polling booths about to open, the crude sloganising gets even more extreme. Today was a good example.

Kemi Badenoch started quite well. At the weekend she announced a plan to cut the interest graduates pay on their student loans. She was responding to increasing media interest in student loans in recent weeks (triggered by the freeze in the loan repayment threshold coming into force in April). But ministers have noticed this too, and they are already looking at the issue, as Will Hazell explains in a story in the i today which includes this wonderful quote.

One source with knowledge of discussions said that Treasury officials were “beavering away trying to work out if there is a different combination of the interest rate and the threshold level that makes increasingly influential young graduates stop shouting at them”.

Badenoch got Starmer to concede that the government is considering changing the loan rules. She taunted him quite effectively over Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, saying before the general election “graduates, you will pay less under a Labour government.” And she was a bit more explicit than she has been in the past about disowning the policy failures of the past government. (See 12.14pm.) But her “paedo protection party” jibe was crude and excessive, and towards the end she had lapsed into low-grade insults. Another problem was that, in exchanges that were relatively routine and unmemorable, Starmer had the best line; this came when he responded to her boast about Tory MPs being under new leadership by making the point that some of them were – because they now have Nigel Farage as their boss.

Towards the end Starmer described Badenoch as “utterly irrelevant”. In some respects that is just regular abuse but, as the Gorton and Denton byelecton illustrates (see 9.11am), two-party politics in the UK has been upended and increasingly that sounds like a structural complaint about the way PMQs is organised.

All the focus is on the Starmer/Badenoch exchanges because she is the only MP who gets six questions. But today it was obvious that Starmer couldn’t wait to finish with Badenoch because he wanted to move on to what mattered to him much more, which was blasting Reform UK and the Greens – a particular concern because of the byelection, but also a fundmental Labour party strategic priority.

This is from Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in Gorton and Denton, responding to what Keir Starmer said about him at PMQs.

I see Keir Starmer is attacking me at PMQs for being “divisive”

A reminder

This by-election is being held because Keir Starmer’s MP slagged off the good people of Gorton & Denton and even joked about pensioners dying

Vote Reform
Get Starmer Out
Put Gorton & Denton First

Calvin Bailey (Lab) say the Greens want to break up Nato. Does the PM agree that they are betraying our security and “becoming Putin’s useful idiots”.

Starmer says the Greens want to pull out of Nato, and negotiate the nuclear deterrent with Putin. And Reform have a former leader in Wales who took Russian bribe. He says Reform and the Greens are both “weak on Nato and soft on Putin”.

Roger Gale (Con) says he asked the PM some months ago why, as DPP, he did not bring charges against Mohamed Al Fayed for rape. He says two dossiers were submitted to the CPS. When will people be charged for helping Fayd.

Starmer says hundreds of thousands of files go in to the CPS every year. He says he does not know when charging decisions will be taken.

Stephen Gethins (SNP) urges Starmer to campaign in Scotland on the government’s record.

Starmer says the SNP used to sit in the third party benches until the 2024. But they don’t now, because they lost so many seats.

Robbie Moore (Con) asks about a Labour councillor in Keighley who he says was responsible for a horrific assault.

Starmer says he will look into this straight away and give Moore an answer

Irene Campbell (Lab) asks about phasing out the use of animals for medical research. She says alternative research methods are increasingly available. She asks for an immediate ban on the use of dogs in these experiments.

Starmer says the government has a strategy to encourage the use of alternative methods.